nick back

I was working on the Technology in the Poll project, a new system for digitally managing and capturing elector and ballots information during the Ontario provincial election. This involved the imaging and configuration of the ePoll Books (laptops), testing of all the equipment (ePoll Books, printers, scanners and LTE modems), and field support once the systems have been deployed to the poll locations. The role was partly 2nd line support to issues escalated by the help desk. It provides an interesting challenge of dealing with a bespoke system (the VoterView software) and supporting a wide range of users at the Electoral District office and polling locations. Being the Lead, I was responsible for managing the local field tech team workload and tasks as well communications with the Elections Ontario team members, ensuring that all the tasks were completed and reported on according to schedule. We succeeded in remaining ahead of schedule during the whole project.

I, alongside initially one business partner, started up a new company importing, distributing, marketing and selling products produced by a UK company Physicool. This has involved a very broad range of duties and tasks, with a steep learning curve in areas such as social media marketing and business operations. A big part of the role has been building relationships in person at trade and consumer shows, by telephone, and by email and social media. Other activities include producing creative content – social media and website content, videos, photos, graphics and eBooks.

I provided IT support for an office of around 100 people – the role was a mixture of supporting the users directly with their PCs and laptops and working on back end systems such as the network, email and telephone systems. This was a very broad role so stretched my ability to handle a wide range of technical and user problems and challenges.

I was contracting on-site at Symantec HQ (also Vodafone HQ for 3 months) – two enterprise size companies, so I was working as part of large teams focused on providing user support for their laptop and desktop hardware and their software applications. This provided different challenges – working within much larger organisations and communicating with many different departments, including 1st line IT support teams based abroad.

I was providing 2nd line support for users in an office of around 400 people and also for a large team of home based workers. This was primarily focused on supporting users directly but also included a wide variety of other aspects – VOIP telephony, VPN and remote access systems, Database systems (Lotus Notes), backup administration and data recovery, and base networking support. I also became in charge of training the new home users in using their equipment, and connecting remotely to the office. I led a major project to refresh all the laptops in the organisation.

I provided 2nd line support for office based users, both in person and over the phone. This role was a mixture of building and configuring new PCs and laptops for users and supporting users with hardware or software issues. This role gave me good experience with working in a highly secure IT environment of a financial institution.

This was a very broad role, covering end user support, builds creation and deployment, software deployment, Windows application servers, Citrix, printers and print servers, Blackberry hardware and server, software auditing systems, and basic networking support. The role also involved setting up and maintaining small regional offices around the UK and other European countries. The role enabled me to very quickly widen my experience, with exposure to many aspects of IT infrastructure and systems.